Second Chances
by FieldofRoses
Summary: Beth Larson has an eating disorder and is planning on killing herself the very next day when a man in a blue box saves her life without knowing it.
1. Chapter 1

I sit in front of my computer screen, my favorite word processor open and the cursor blinking, waiting for me to type. I stared at the screen, scanning my brain for something to say. I've never done this before. I've turned over ideas, put them down, and then picked up another for days, weeks, months now, and now that the time has finally come, I don't know what to say. What can I say? Maybe I shouldn't say anything at all, it's not like anyone will care either way. No one seems to care about anything I do, unless it's something I'm not proud of.

I won't be proud of what I'm going to do tomorrow, but it'll be just because I won't be able to feel anything. I'll be dead. It's been a long time coming. I've wanted to do this ever since I was twelve and my Mom ditched me and my dad. Dad started to drink, and even though his body is here, he's not. Alcohol took him away from me a long time ago. I'm seventeen now, short and grotesquely fat. I try to fix the fat problem, but it didn't work at first, so now if I eat, I just vomit it up. My teachers can tell that I've lost weight, but it's not enough to worry anybody.

I turn to my desk, and pick up the pills that I've been hoarding whenever I could for months. I'm supposed to be taking them for depression, but they didn't work they way they were supposed to. So I pretended I was taking them, and got refills whenever I would be out of them. They'll help me tomorrow. I put them back in the drawer and cover them up with the papers I've been using. It's not a very good hiding place, but it doesn't matter. No one looks through my stuff, but it feels wrong not to hide them somehow.

I turn back to my screen, and after a few minutes of staring at my blank screen expressionless, someone straps weights to my eyelids. I can't keep them open. I close the word processor, after it asks if I want to save my document. I click now, considering the fact that there's nothing to save except for the formatting I set up to stall when I first sat down. I change into my pajamas, and climb into bed, and drift off to sleep, where I don't have to worry about anything. I can just _be. _I can just be twelve year old Beth Larson, back when everything was okay.


	2. Chapter 2

_Disclaimer: I do not own anything from this story except for Beth and her acquaintances. I do not own Doctor Who. I do not own David Tennant. I do not own the TARDIS. You get the idea._

I run around the gym, staring at my feet and the floor as it passes under me again, and again, and again. I listen to the slapping of my sneakers against the floor, trying to let it relax me a bit. I don't want to be all stressed out and such on my last day. I'm going to hopefully start and finish my letter tonight, and I'm going to take all the pills I'll need to never wake up. Then I'll never have to deal with any crap ever again.

I know it may be silly to constantly think of my suicide. It's not like this hasn't been a long time coming, you'd think I'd simply accept it and not think about it too much. But there's a difference between having a gut feeling that you're going to die soon, and that every day and every action you take is leading you closer to it, and knowing that you're not going to live to see the next day. It's not that you're sad, but you're in this state of 'Oh my God, this is actually happening.'

I know I won't regret what I do, and not just because I'll be dead and not have the ability to feel anything.

The bell from the timer rings, and I hear people around me yell their thanks to other people, as if they released us from the running instead of the timer. And it wouldn't make any sense to thank the timer, because it just an inanimate object. It was set to go off after ten minutes. So there's really no sense in thanking anyone. I go over to the water fountain with everyone else. People pretend I'm invisible, as always. That is, until my turn comes to get water and people get aggravated because that's even more time, one more person, keeping them from their water. I drink a few seconds, to avoid any more anger that's not directed at me only, but at anyone who wants water. I sit on the floor and wait for everyone else to finish so class can actually start.

Gym class, how I loathe thee. I guess I should be happy for it, after all, I get a break in the middle of the school day to burn off calories, but oh my God, it sucks. First, I have to change in front of a bunch of other girls. We're not allowed to change in the bathroom stall, because some people actually do have to use the restroom. (In theory, most people just try to spend as much time in the locker room as possible, talking to their friends that they can get away with. I can't say that I mind that part. The longer everyone stays in, the shorter class is. Then comes the warm-up. Stretching and the run. After we finally finish that round of torture, we move on to whatever the Coach has decided we would like. We never do. Woo hoo.

My day goes a lot like that, only there are classes that are slightly better. Not by much, most of the time. Sure, there are times that lessons can get interesting, but it's not common at all. I go through my classes like a zombie, invisible, already dead to the world, as always.

Then the last bell rings. "Thank God," I mumble under my breath, as I rush out the building with everyone else, like we're fish in a stream. I get in my car, turn my music up really high, and start driving away. Cars go by at first, and then they start to thin out and be replaced by fields of crops and trees surrounding them. It's common scenery where I live. As soon as I get out of town, all the corn and cotton and tobacco fields start showing up. Then I see blue in the trees.

It catches my interest. Normally the only color I see out here is green. I stop the car and go to look. I'm not worried about getting in trouble, I'm going to be dead soon enough. I wander into the forest, and don't have to walk long before I see a blue box. A man steps out. "Who are you?" I demand to know, narrowing my eyes.

I'm being nosy, but whatever. He just stepped out of a little British telephone booth looking thing, only it's blue, out in the middle of nowhere. "I'm the Doctor," he said.


	3. Chapter 3

_Disclaimer: Again, I don't own the doctor, David Tennant, or the TARDIS. I do own Beth and any of her classmates, family, etc, though._

_There's a lot of dialogue, so if you're not a fan, sorry. The next chapter or so will have less. Thanks for the feedback, (review, favorite, etc.) I really appreciate it. I wasn't expecting anyone to like it, so yay, people did. Sorry for the short chapters, it's just easier to write that day and you get faster updates. I think it's a win-win situation._

"Doctor…" I trailed off, wanting some sort of name; people don't just go by their title.

"That's all. Just the Doctor," he told me.

I narrowed my eyes. I knew that his name couldn't be The Doctor, because that would be stupid. But whatever, if he doesn't want to tell a random stranger his name, then he doesn't have to. But that means I won't tell him my name, either.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"I won't tell you," I told him.

"Why not?" he asked.

"If you won't tell me who you are, you don't get to know who I am, either," I say.

"Okay then, Human," He says.

I roll my eyes. "What is that thing and why are you wearing a suit out in the middle of nowhere?"

"Why shouldn't I wear a suit?" he asks, "It's just a suit,"

"Wearing a suit implies that you have somewhere to go, which, considering the fact that you're hanging out in a phone booth in the middle of the woods, I'm guessing you don't," I tell him.

"As a matter of fact, I do. And I need you to help me,"

"I just met you,"

"I still need help with something, it'll only take a couple hours. Judging by the fact that you stopped to interrogate a stranger, I'm guessing you don't have anywhere to go,"

"You don't know my name,"

"Whose fault is that?"

"Yours,"

"How?"

"You wouldn't tell me who you are, so I'm not telling you who I am,"

"Just listen to me, Human,"

"No,"

"Do you want the world to end?"

"Of course not," I told him. Just because I was going to die didn't mean that everyone else deserved to. I'm sure there are some half decent people out there, I just haven't found them.

"Then help me help them. This is something that I cannot do alone, and without your help, everyone on Earth will die, including you," he told me, grabbing my shoulders and looking deep into my eyes.

I shrug his hands off of me. He was wrong, I would die whether I helped him or not. If I didn't help, everyone else would die along with me, but I'd get my typical evening, the one I was counting on. If I did help, everyone would die. It would be so much different than what I was expecting, but maybe I could figure out some way to kill myself and make it look like an accident in the process. "Fine," I say, "I'll help. What do I have to do?"


	4. Chapter 4

_I'm sure you've read this enough to know the drill. I do not own Doctor Who or any of the characters, items, etc from the show itself. Just Beth and her acquaintances. If I did, I wouldn't be writing fanfiction. Thanks for all the great feedback, I really appreciate it. Especially the reviews, I like them the most. Sorry that this chapter took a bit longer to go up than most of mine. (OMG, it took two days for it to do up!) It took me a bit longer to find a monster for them to fight, because I wanted to come up with one of my own, but I couldn't. So yeah. I'm going to stop rambling now and (hopefully) get to the story. I can't write action scenes, so sorry for the lack of fighting._

"You'll find out when I do," he tells me.

I frown. "So you have no clue what you're doing?" I ask him in disbelief.

"Well, I have a general idea, but I don't know the details. All I know is that I'm here for a reason, and it'll probably have something to do with saving humanity, again," he says.

"That's stupid, there's no way for you to know if you're here for a reason. In fact, I'm fairly sure you're crazy. How long have you been in that thing?" I ask him.

He starts walking sort of fast. I stand there. He needed to answer my question. After ten feet or so, he turns to me. "Aren't you coming?"  
>I sigh and follow him. "I still think you're crazy," I mumble as we get out from the trees and see the endless fields.<p>

He ignores me and takes out a thing. He presses a button and the end lights up blue and it makes a really annoying, high pitched noise. He scans the fields with it, and then it starts bleeping. "Come with me, hurry!" he says, and takes off running towards the spot where the thing bleeped.

I run after him. We don't have to run for long. We see an old man walking in the distance, relying on a cane. The Doctor frowns. "What is it? It's just an old man," I whisper. The old man's out of earshot, but still.

"You never know. There are lots of near-human species, some just happen to look more like humans," he told me.

"No, there aren't. There are humans and animals. Are you sure you aren't crazy?" I ask him.

He avoids my question. "Be more creative, Human,"

"Have you ever seen a dog that looks like me or you?"

"You look a bit like a pug," he said sarcastically.

"Shut up, I do not."

He shrugged as if it didn't matter, "There are Kaleds, Gond… Time Lords, and there are the Abzorbalovians, even though they don't really count."

"The what?"

"Abzorbalovians. I've only ever had problems with one of them, the Abzorbaloff. They can absorb a person into them by touch. They can take the face of their victims, along with their memories and consciousness for several days. They use a limitation field to keep all those people from destroying his body and killing them. The Abzorbaloff had the limitation field disguised as a cane, and if I'm right, this is another Abzorbalovian, and it's taking after the Abzorbaloff," he explained.

"So you think that old man is trying to absorb the Earth?" I ask.

"No, just the people on it,"

"_Why?_" I ask. I didn't see the point in it.

"I don't know," he says.

"So what do we do?"

"You distract him, and I'll try to break the cane. And do not touch him. He'll absorb you, too," he says.

"Okay, got it."

I start walking to the old man, and when I get up to him, I say, "Excuse me? My car broke down," I start, nodding to my car, still parked next to the woods from where I left it, "It made a funny noise, then just stopped. I can't get it to start; do you think you could help?"

I see the Doctor behind him. Not very close, he probably took a wider circle to avoid the man seeing him. "I don't know that much about cars, sorry. Is it a tire?"

"No, I already checked. I ramble on about the different things I'd do if my car broke. The Doctor gets closer and closer to the man, and gets behind him, waiting. Eventually, the man shifts his weight to his left leg, and switches his cane to that side. There. Now the Doctor can get to it easily.

"Well, let's go over and see if I can possibly figure it out," and he reaches out to my arm, as if to try to guide me over to the car. I yank my arm away before he can touch me, and the Doctor grabs the cane and snaps it in half. The old man melts into a pile of goop. Just like that, the danger was gone.


	5. Chapter 5

_You know that I don't own Doctor Who, so I'm not going to spend much time on the intro. Sorry it took awhile to get up; I just had a hard time getting started. _

"That wasn't bad," the Doctor said.

"You act like you're surprised about that," I said, frowning.

"You never know how someone's going to act. You could have yelled that I was there, and turned around to run away," he said.

"So you assume the worst out of people?"

"I didn't say that,"

"You implied it."

"That doesn't matter right now," he said.

"Suuuure, whatever you say," I say, letting sarcasm into my voice.

"Don't get sarcastic,"

"I can't help it. It's a reflex," I stick my tongue out at him.

"It is not!"

"It is too!"

We argue like an old married couple for awhile longer, before I ask, "So, how did you know that stuff?"

"What stuff?" he asked.

"About the old man, how he wanted to kill everyone and we had to break his cane," I explained.

"Oh, that. I learned it at the academy when I was a kid, ninety or so."

"Ninety is a kid?"

"Yes. I'm an alien,"

"I knew you were crazy."

"I'm not crazy!"

"I hear solitary confinement can make a person crazy… How long where you in that box? Must be a long time, if you're delusional to the point that you think you're an alien."

"I'm not crazy, would you like proof?"

I laugh once. "What kind of proof? Are you going to grow a third eye or something?"  
>"No, I don't grow extra eyes!"<p>

"That's lame. If you're going to think you're an alien, you should claim to do something cool, at least."

"I'm the Doctor. I'm from Gallifrey. I'm 903 year old. I travel through space and time in my TARDIS. I've saved the earth so many times, you wouldn't be able to count them all! Is that 'cool' enough for you?"

"I'll tell you what, if you can manage to prove it, I'll stop calling you crazy."

"Excellent."

"But I'm not saying that it isn't lame that you can't grow an extra eye."


	6. Author's Note

I owe you all an apology. I left you all without the rest of the story, and I had been so excited about it and everything! I'll get back to it, I don't know if I'll be able to update as often as I had been before I stopped coming on, but I'll hopefully have another chapter up by Friday.

-Lyndie


	7. Chapter 6

He turns to walk back towards the woods and his box.

'What the heck am I doing?' I think as I follow the Doctor. Then I figure that nothing bad can happen, considering that I'm going to die later anyway. Overdosing on pills, following a psycho stranger who thinks he's an alien to an unknown place where he attempts to experiment on me… they're close enough.

"You sound American. Are we in America?" he asks me.

"Of course not, we're on Mars," I say, rolling my eyes.

"No, we are not. Mars is different," he says.

I just roll my eyes again, and we walk in silence for a bit. We arrive back at the telephone booth he had been in earlier. He opens the door and goes inside. I wait outside for a couple minutes, until he sticks his head back out. "Aren't you coming in?" he asks.

"No, that won't fit the both of us," I point out.

"It will, just come in and you'll see," he tells me.

I sigh and get in, planning to show him how cramped it is and get out, and if he can't prove that he's an alien in the woods, then I'm not interested. But to my surprise, stepping into the tiny telephone booth revealed a large, cavernous space with a thing in the middle. "What's this? Why is it bigger on the inside?" I ask.

"This is my TARDIS- time and relative dimension in space. It's my spaceship. It can travel anywhere in time and space, its brilliant! It has a parallel dimension, making it bigger once you go in," he explains.

I step outside the TARDIS, and touch one of the walls to make sure it's really there. Then I stand with one foot on the inside and one foot on the outside, one foot in each dimension, and touch each wall. "That is so cool! How do you do it?"

"What do you mean?"

"It must be some kind of circus trick, how do you do it? I won't tell anyone."

"It's not a trick,"

"It has to be, things like this don't really happen,"

"Yes, they do,"

"Maybe inside your head, after all, you're the psycho alien. But not in the real world,"

"Would you like to take a trip? Just so you'll believe me?"


	8. Chapter 7

_A/N: I'll be skipping quite a bit of time so I can get to a more exciting part of the story. It'll make the story considerably shorter, but it'll also make it better, so I think it's a reasonable swap. Quality over quantity, you know. I only own my imagination. Beth and her human people are my brainchildren, I don't own anything else._

The Doctor opened up a whole new way of thinking, for me. Before, I never would have guessed my life would be anything like this. We go to whole new worlds and time periods, and I know it's dangerous. I know that I could die at any time, but I wouldn't change it for anything, because it's most thrilling time in my life. Saving people makes me feel like maybe, just maybe, my existence wasn't a complete mistake. Besides, it's actually buying me time. I wasn't sure exactly how long I'd been with the Doctor, but it had certainly been more than I few hours. A few months is more like it. I think that if I have to go back, I'll die. Literally.

It's not just the excitement that I love about it all. There's the Doctor himself. There's just something about him. I can't quite put my finger on it. It could be his sense of humor, or how passionate he is, or how he can just keep smiling through it all. It could be a combination of all three. I knew it wasn't his looks. Don't get me wrong, he looks good and all, but it's not just that. I'm no Bella Swan. I also know how I feel. I know how butterflies are in my stomach whenever he smiles at me, and I can hardly help but smile back. I know what I think about him. Maybe I'm falling in love. I don't know. I've never been in love before. I guess I just need to wait and find out.

There are things that the TARDIS didn't fix, though. The worst of which is what the mirror says about me. I've been told that I'm not fat. The Doctor never comments on my weight, except in a teasing way when I'm trying to get out of eating. People have joked that I look like a good, strong wind would blow me away. The scale says that I don't weigh too much, but I still keep track of the numbers obsessively. The mirror never lies, and the mirror hurls insults at me. It tells me how fat I am and how it doesn't matter how much I run, I'll never be thin enough. It points out every flaw of my disgusting body. Sometimes I want to smash it as its punishment for trying to ruin my life, but how could I? It's my only source of honesty when it comes to how I look. Plus, it would be hard to explain to the Doctor.

I walked into the console room one afternoon, still towel drying my wet hair from the shower I had just taken. The Doctor was pressing a bunch of buttons. "Are we going somewhere now?" I asked him.

"Well, I don't want to be stuck in the TARDIS all day, and I doubt you do, so we're just going to pop into London and get dinner," he tells me.

Dinner. Food. That's a problem. "I'm not hungry," I said automatically.

"Then we can wait in London awhile, then get dinner," he said.

Okay, calm down. I can order a green salad appetizer as my meal. 200 calories. I can burn those off my running more than usual next time we went somewhere. Or at least that's what I kept telling myself. "Okay," I said, and the TARDIS took off.


End file.
